The Long Death Rattle of Ranking

Over the last few weeks of 2008 there was a lot of talk about drastic changes to Google’s ranking algorithms that would come in early 2009.   At PubCon 2008 in November Bruce Clay proclaimed that “ranking is dead” in a much-discussed session.  Here’s a video of Mike MacDonald from WebProNews interviewing Bruce about his presentation.

To recap briefly, Bruce bases his claim that “ranking is dead” on the observation of increasingly personalized and localized search results and the prediction that Google will move to return personlized search results even when users aren’t logged in to their Google accounts.  If this is true, and to a large extent it already is, no two people will see the same results for a given keyword.

Traditional SEO dealt with rankings in a direct way.  Many SEO service providers sent ranking reports to their clients to demonstrate success and growth.  Some shady “SEO firms” sold clients on guarantees for X number of Google page one rankings – they could pull this off because the clients were watching the rankings and not the traffic.  Many of our clients came to us looking to be #1 in Google for [insert keyword here].  Our first order of action was to sit them down and explain why being #1 for [insert keyword here] might be fancy but it has no intrinsic value.

In this sense, ranking has never been the best way to measure success.  With these new developments it’s even less reliable.

I’d love to say ranking is dead.  Focus on ranking is a surefire path to ignoring the metrics that mean something – like traffic, bounce rates, conversion rates, etc.  The trouble is, ranking still matters – SEOs just can’t point to it anymore and say, “see, we did a good thing.”

Ranking isn’t dead yet, but it’s no metric for success

Unless Google develops an entirely new way of displaying search results, rankings will always matter.  The user who performs a search often bases her result selection partially or entirely on ranking.  That hasn’t changed, and it’s not likely to change in the near future.

What has changed is that now, from the other side of the equation, the SEO or webmaster can’t predict where they rank.  Or, at least, it’s become much harder to do so.  Rankings are still central to the search user’s experience.   They still matter.  But from the marketing data standpoint they have been a fuzzy metric for some time now – and if Bruce’s predictions come to pass, it’ll be tough to pinpoint them at all.

Watch your traffic, not your rankings

The bottom line here is that rankings themselves never amounted to much more than a pretty report and boasting rights.  Sure, you got that #1 position you were gunning for – but did you earn anything other than pride from it?  That’s not a rhetorical question, and answering it means you have to take a close look at your traffic and other actionable metrics like your bounce rate or conversion rate – or your bottom line.

This is nothing new.  I’ve been researching and practicing SEO for about four years now (not to say that makes me a veteran), and among the first things I learned was that rankings don’t have value until you tie them to your actual earnings as closely as you can.  That broad keyword that gets so much traffic – you’ll likely find it’s a bit too broad to bring you a strong conversion rate.  That’s not to say ranking for broad keywords has no value – far from it – but the point is that ranking in itself means nothing.  It always has.

Google’s next move might mean we as SEOs take our eyes off rankings forever – or, at least, it’ll muddy up the signal enough that, pending the development of new methods and software to determine the average or range of rank from wide data sources, it’ll be more trouble to measure rankings than it will be worth.